The present invention relates to agricultural balers.
More particularly the invention relates to balers which subject blade-type vegetation (e.g. grass) or stalk-type vegetation (e.g. wheat stalks) to an initial compacting step which is followed by a final or main compacting step.
Conventional high-pressure agricultural balers compact the vegetation to form bales weighing between 10 and 30 kg and having an average density of about 150 kg/m.sup.3. Handling and transporting these bales is rather labor-intensive, which presents a problem because of the steadily decreasing supply of agricultural labor. For this reason it has more recently been proposed to utilize large balers which compress the vegetation to rectangular or cylindrical bales weighing about 500 kg and having a density of between 50 and 100 kg/m.sup.3. Such large bales can then be readily transported on trailers or the like, so that the use of this second type of baler constitutes a way of saving time and labor.
However, these large bales have the disadvantage that their average density of 50 to 100 kg/cm.sup.3 is relatively low. This means that the capacity of trailers or similar vehicles which are used for transporting these bales is generally under-utilized, especially where transportation over long distances is required. Attempts to increase the degree of compaction and thereby the bale density, so as to be able to load more bales in the space available on the transporting vehicle, have heretofore been unsuccessful.